Ron DeSantis reveals Donald Trump’s role in stopping Bahamian hurricane evacuees from coming to Florida

Florida’s Governor is speaking out about how President Donald Trump stemmed the tide of Bahamians coming to the state after Hurricane Dorian in 2019.

Speaking at the National Review Institute’s “Idea Summit,” Gov. Ron DeSantis described a boat owner who brought people from Freeport to Palm Beach County after the island city got “leveled.”

“I’m the Governor of Florida. I can’t have tens of thousands of people deposited in South Florida. It would cost us massive amounts of money. We got a lot of people in Florida with a relationship with the Bahamas,” DeSantis recounted during the talk. “They’ll want to help these people and you can do that, but you do it over there.”

Trump advised DeSantis to contact the Department of Homeland Security. Then one night, the Governor got a call from the President himself.

“We’re scheduled to have a bunch (of evacuees) dumped. I’m in bed. It’s like 12:00. I get a call at 12:30 and he said, ‘Ron, the boat is taken care of.’ Click. And no one ever heard from this boat ever again,” DeSantis said.

The Governor has had interesting takes on Bahamians over the years, including a hypothetical he floated while running for President about people on the island archipelago attacking Florida.

“If people were firing rockets from the Bahamas into, like, Fort Lauderdale, we would never allow that. I mean, we would flatten them. Within like five minutes, we would flatten them,” he said in Eldridge, Iowa, in early December 2023, drawing a parallel to the situation in Israel.

Despite the need for the U.S. Embassy in Nassau to clarify that his comments don’t reflect American foreign policy, the Governor continued to use this metaphor.

But despite using that hypothetical as a crowd-pleaser in Iowa, he never told the apparently real hurricane story until years later.